When I reflect back on my experiences at South Bay EA, the one thing that would save us so much time (that we can then use for non-scalable activities like 1:1s) is if we had high quality pre-made discussion sheets.
(To be clear, this is still an ongoing problem).
It takes us ~3-12 hours to make a typical discussion sheet for one meetup.
Naively, it would be really helpful if CEA or a crowdsourced group (eg, this forum) worked on creating high-quality discussion sheets that would save us 90% of the effort.
I could imagine other content being helpful as well, for example (“intro to EA” emails), event descriptions etc (though some of them are material you can easily crib from other EA groups listed on meetup.com and Facebook).
Reasons against this being particularly useful:
1. Heterogeneity of EA groups’s needs: It might just be really hard to prepare useful sheets for an “EA local group (or university group)” in the abstract, since different local groups differ so much in knowledge of EA, demographic composition, schedules, timing preferences etc.
Ex. In South Bay, I’ve used examples from tech to illustrate cognitive biases in our instrumental rationality discussions (I think this is reasonable since ~100% of people who come to our EA events in Silicon Valley have a passing familiarity with tech). We also try to cater to people who have moderate familiarity and interest in EA, rather than try to “hard sell” EA to an unsympathetic audience, or be very useful to professional EAs (the latter because professional EAs rarely attend, rather than as a deliberate choice).
There’s also a related problem where trying to serve an EA audience in the abstract might end up being just worse than local groups creating their own sheets and sharing knowledge, since there’s more feedback from reality in the latter version.
2. The process of doing content creation is actually really good/necessary to develop organizer’s understanding. I definitely learned a lot from making sheets/event introductions, especially in fields I had little prior knowledge in (eg, population ethics, moral uncertainty, systematized creativity). If we had pre-made sheets, maybe we’ll have horrible illusions of transparency, and the organizers will convey a lot of wrong information about the topic or EA to our members.
3. Adoption concerns Even if {CEA, this forum} do end up creating material that’s better than what 99% of groups can make for ourselves + save them 50-80% of the effort, it might still not be adopted and waste a lot of time.
The 2019 Local Group Organizers Survey found large percentages of organizers reporting that more “written resources on how to run to run a group” and “written resources on EA thinking and concepts” would be highly useful.
Would that distinguish between people who knew about all the current resources and still wanted more versus those who hadn’t been connected to what is currently available?
There was no way to ask whether people knew about all the resources that currently existed (although in the next survey we could ask whether they know about the EA Hub’s resources specifically). We do know from other questions in this survey and in 2017′s that many group leaders are not aware of existing services in general though.
I don’t think there was an exact question on this (unless I’m mistaken), but as a proxy I’d be curious to see a breakdown of this question for new vs. older groups and more vs. less experienced group organisers. It wouldn’t be a perfect proxy, since older groups may still not know about resources but also not need them, but might be worth considering.
EAHub has a large and growing list of resources collected and written for local groups.
Thanks! Though this seems more like a comment than an answer.
right, sorry 😊
No worries, thanks for pointing out a resource.
It looks like you’re creating some pretty high-quality resources! I can see why they’re fairly time intensive.
Have you shared these with other local groups before now? Have they been adopted or adapted there?
I know Stanford EA sometimes use some of our old sheets with their modifications[1]. I believe they don’t focus as much on the same type of discussion-focused meetups that we do anymore, so unclear if they have solid metrics on how helpful the sheets are for them (though at least we’re saving them some time).
I’ve also shared our sheets (notably none of them are designed for any group in mind other than SB) online a few times. A lot of other local group organizers appeared excited about them but nobody followed up, so my guess is that uptake elsewhere probably is nonexistent or pretty low [2].
[1] SB EA sort of grew out of Stanford EA so it makes a lot of sense that our structure/content is sufficiently similar that it’s usable for their purposes.
[2] Notably I wasn’t really tracking that Stanford EA used our sheets until I explicitly asked a few weeks ago, so I guess it’s unlikely though not impossible if, eg, a few groups saw my posts on FB or our material on the EA Hub and adapted our sheets but never bothered contacting us.
If most other groups aren’t using the resources that currently exist, I’m not sure it’s a good use of time to create further “generic” resources—although I can appreciate your frustration with the amount of time it’s taking you!
Yeah I guess that’s the null hypothesis, thought it’s possible that people don’t use the current resources because it’s not “good” enough (eg, insufficiently accessible, too much jargon, too many local context specific stuff, etc).
Another thing to consider is “curriculum”, ie, right now discussion sheets, etc are shared to the internet without tips on how to adapt them (since local groups who wrote the sheets have enough local context/institutional knowledge on how the sheets should be used).
An interesting analogy is the “instructor’s edition” of textbooks, which iirc in the US K-12 system often has almost as much supplementary material as the textbook’s content itself!
Hi Linch, we actually have a guide to using discussion sheets on the eahub now: https://resources.eahub.org/events/articles/discussion-tips/
I do think that currently there is low awareness of the Hub’s contents, and we will be working to help improve knowledge of what exists so that group organisers can use the resources better.
Thanks for the link and I agree that it’s a valuable resource for a group starting out!
That said, I wonder if there is an illusion of transparency here and maybe we’re talking past each other?
To be concrete, here are two problems I don’t think the Hub’s collection of resources currently fulfill.
1. My impression from looking through the content list on the EA Hub is that none of the sheets from the other groups can be directly adapted (even with significant modifications) for South Bay EA’s audience, since the questions are either a) too broad and intro-level (like the CEA sheets) or b) have a lot of mandatory reading that’s arguably not realistic for a heterogeneous group with many working professionals (eg the Harvard Arete stuff). I think SB EA is open to trying for more mandatory reading/high-engagement stuff among a subset of the members however. But right now if we are interested in an intermediate-level discussion on a topic that we haven’t previously discussed (eg, geo-engineering, hinge of history), we basically have to make the sheets ourselves.
Historically we’ve found this to be true even for common topics that the online EA community has discussed for many years.
This isn’t just a problem with the Hub to be clear; my group has been looking for a way to steal sheets from other groups since at least mid-2018. (It’s possible our needs are really idiosyncratic but it’d be a bit of a surprise if that’s true?)
2. I don’t think of any of the existing sheets or guiding material as curriculum, per se. At least when we were creating the sheets, my co-organizers and I mostly did things that “seemed reasonable” through a combination of intuition and rough guesses/surveys about what our members liked. At no point did we have a strong educational theory or built things with an eye towards the latest advances in the educational literature. I suspect other local groups are similar to us in that when they created sheets and organized discussions, they tried their best with limited time and care, rather than have a strong theory of education or change.
If I were to design things from scratch, I’d probably want to work in collaboration with eg, educational or edutech professionals who are also very familiar with EA (some of whom have expressed interest in this). It’s possible that EA material is so out-of-distribution that being familiar with the pedagogical literature isn’t helpful, but I feel like it’s at least worth trying?
Thanks for clarifying, I get what you’re saying now!
TL:DR: while I’m in agreement that these things would be valuable, in the current state it wouldn’t make sense to prioritise them when there’s a lot of value to be found in increasing awareness of existing resources, even if they are imperfect and writing about resources where there currently are none for common events.
I agree that there is a severe lack of resources, we actually link to the South Bay discussion lists (unfortunately since you made the resources there isn’t anything new regarding discussions sheets). We are also slowly adding and developing them as I am running a series of guided discusisons for the Philly group.
Given where we were at with the resources up until recently, the most valuable and time efficient thing to do was to organise existing resources and then evaluate what the most pressing gaps in knowledge were. i.e. it was better to have some resources for all the basic group activities—be that running discussions, how to host events, moderating talks, venue, food and logistics, leadership structure etc. As you can see, a long list of topics! the goal was to consolidate movement-wide knowledge, and have resources well-organised and accessible.
I don’t think your group was unique with regards to needing resources, although I think other groups may do more socials and other kinds of meetups that require less preparation.
I agree that there isn’t a curriculum, and that taking lessons from education science would be very useful and valuable. I think that we can definitely work to make EA principles and ideas more accessible by a large margin. Currently, there aren’t enough people working on group building resources to do something like this, and I believe that just improving the knowledge of existing resources will provide the most value to group organisers. That being said, Catherine, who is in charge of the Resources team, does have an education background, and I think that has definitely influenced our work positively!